by Writing that blog post about the Mocăniță was the last thing I did before my laptop went totally kaput. A fifth and final variety of blue screen, then something telling me to choose my keyboard layout. Armenian, Assamese, Inuktitut. Whatever I chose I was locked out of the system. I took it back to the repair shop but I decided I really didn’t trust the bloke there. Googling and writing a message on a forum got me nowhere – all the information out there might as well have been in Inuktitut – so on Thursday I cut my losses and bought a new laptop – an HP with plenty of storage space and RAM. At 3700 lei (NZ$1350 or £650) it was hardly the cheapest out there, but a laptop isn’t something I can skimp on, and heaven knows I skimp on enough. I took possession of it yesterday afternoon and ran a successful lesson from it almost immediately. So far I’ve been very impressed with its file transfer speed. My only battle so far has been trying to de-link everything from the bloody cloud. If I could get the old laptop in usable condition (at 4½ years, it’s not even that old), then it would give me protection from any future technical meltdowns.
In the short window between writing that last blog post and everything going phut, I got my old bike back (would you believe). This old, long-haired guy was wheeling two old bikes, including mine, near this apartment block. You’ve got my old bike! You nicked it, didn’t you? I’ve told the police. He said he’d bought it from the market (what a coincidence) and then gave it back to me without putting up any sort of fight. That’s a shame. Yeah, OK, have it back. I’ve just put it on OLX, Romania’s version of TradeMe. My new one is so much better.
On Saturday I met the British teacher again, this time at his place in Dumbrăvița. His wife wasn’t around. We went for a walk with their gangly dog (really her dog) in the wooded area nearby. It’s a popular area for mountain bikes, and there’s even a track that takes you all the way to Serbia. Their apartment, which they’re renting, is in a different league to mine. It was built two years ago on the edge of Dumbrăvița furthest from Timișoara. Next to the development, where the streets are named after scientists like Newton and Kepler, are fields that probably won’t be full of sunflowers for much longer. Housing estates in Romania grow much more organically than in the UK, where you might see 200 virtually identical houses cheek-by-jowl on rabbit warrens of far-too-narrow streets. Their two-storey flat is modern and airy, with all mod cons. They have three bathrooms with spas and jacuzzis and showers where you can have your favourite radio station piped through. They even have a reasonable-sized garden. What I really couldn’t abide though was all the ghastly word art in their living room. I’m guessing it was already there – they don’t strike me as do-the-things-that-make-you-happy kind of people. On the mantelpiece were four plasticky foot-high letters spelling out LOVE. I would have rearranged them to read VOLE. A nice friendly water-rat. On the wall was “Life is short, break the rules.” A sign telling you, ordering you to break the rules, isn’t the irony of that just wonderful? It’s all very corporate, like the company where I started in 2004 in which “FUN!” was one of its values; why people decided in about 2010 to drag that depressingly awful corporate shite into their homes I have no idea.
On the way back home I went through the old part of Dumbrăvița: the old church, the park, the town hall. It’s all very pleasant. Just like in the Mehala area and I’m sure many others too, the main street of old Dumbrăvița has plum trees and the odd quince tree lining the berms. (Now berm is a word I never used before I moved to New Zealand.) I picked four kilos of plums but could have snagged forty.
We’re having sunny and serene early-autumn weather. Calm before the storm that will soon hit us, as Covid numbers keep climbing.
